A multicultural way

I had to wait for quite some time opposite the Boy Scouts Headquarters in Hamrun on Friday.

The scouts were holding a Carnival party inside the former Hamrun train station. Mothers and fathers accompanied their children (today, boys and girls can be scouts) in their Carnival costume and left. Many times cars were doubleparked while this party went on.

It was a scene I remember from years and years back, and the children still flock to it and enjoy themselves. Inside the HQ, children run around in sheer delight, the bigger among them with that very particular pre-party euphoria mindset.

They have been doing this for years and years and nothing has changed.

Outside, everything has changed. The shops in the area have now been taken over by ethnic barbers and the people walking by on foot are not Maltese, at least the vast majority of them. They go their way in parallel.

There is absolutely no sign of tension. Chaos yes, because of the heavy traffic, and also because of double-parking and the lot, but not tension.

Hamrun, and some other towns and villages in today’s Malta, has gone multicultural. People argue whether this is good or bad. It has happened: that is the most important fact.

So far, though, this multiculturalism is along parallel lines – people go about their daily lives without any reference to other people moving through the same area. There are no structures which bring such disparate people together – the few State structures like the police, the Post Office, and so on – are neutral structures offering the same service to whoever needs it.

The one structure that in a way breaks down the barriers is the school. In fact, I noticed that children from a Syrian family that has been in Malta for many years came home from school in a Carnival costume like thousands of schoolchildren across Malta.

Do they know that Carnival is derived from a Christian tradition dating many years back? I doubt it. A costume is a costume, and a party is a party regardless of how it came into being.

Such is the assimilation that has been going on in our country. It is not a pre-ordained pattern of assimilation. It is a slow process, an unobtrusive melting of old ethnic groups and a merging of the same into an amorphous mass.

Maybe, or rather certainly, the Maltese in this equation grum- ble among themselves about the inroads the foreigners are making in our country. Maybe the non-Maltese grumble in their own language and others like the Italian, who was mad enough to post his bitter anger in Italian on Facebook.

Otherwise, multicultural assimilation is here to stay. And, unless something really bad were to happen, assimilation is the way of the future. In my opinion, we really do not need to push it forward – it is moving enough as it is.